Pianist Steven Lin returns to Bass Hall with new perspective

A pair of Cliburn Competition alumni and the concertmaster of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra will share the stage with three even-more-famous guys named Ludwig, Franz Joseph and Wolfgang at Bass Hall this weekend.

The Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra’s 2015 Classical Masters Festival, which begins Friday, will feature the music of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, three titans of the classical era, a period that runs roughly from the middle of the 18th century through the early 19th century.

The trio of festival performances is the first in a three-year cycle of concerts focusing on these composers in this annual series presented as a late-August prelude to the symphony’s regular concert season.

For pianist Steven Lin, the featured soloist in Friday’s opening concert, the return to Bass Hall might be seen by local fans as something of a vindication.

In the 2013 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, Lin was an early favorite among critics and Bass Hall audiences alike, but he did not progress beyond the preliminary round. His early dismissal made for one of the most surprising and memorable eliminations in the contest.

Lin is featured prominently in the recently released competition documentary Virtuosity, and, in one of the most poignant scenes of the film, the visibly disappointed pianist looks into the camera and wonders aloud what he could have done to earn the jury’s nod to advance. One expert’s on-air assessment was that he took the great competition risk of “playing to the audience” rather than “to the jury.”

Lin left the event with the John Giordano Jury Chairman Discretionary Award — an honor given to a competitor whom the judges feel has exceptional potential, despite not being chosen as a finalist — and a new perspective on his craft.

“Being eliminated from the Cliburn was the best thing that ever happened to me in my whole career,” said the Los Angeles-born Lin, who has also lived in Taiwan and New York. “That really made me question what I was doing artistically and what I wanted to do with my life.”

Lin realized, he said, that he was taking the wrong approach in his efforts to grow into a professional pianist.

“I was not thinking so much about the music,” he said. “It was more about preparing for the competition. And that can be very unhealthy.”

So Lin stepped back from the piano bench following his truncated Cliburn experience. “I barely practiced for two months. Instead, I just kind of relaxed and reflected on things,” he said.

That unplanned break has paid major dividends for 26-year-old Lin, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Juilliard School before recently graduating with a performance diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he now makes his home.

Since getting back into a more typical routine with the piano, he has maintained a busy performance schedule that has included return visits to North Texas (notably, he was one of the featured pianists in the Van Cliburn Memorial Concert in Sundance Square on the first anniversary of the famed pianist’s death in February 2014). Like many Cliburn alumni, he maintains a close relationship with his competition host family, leading him to call Fort Worth his “second home.”

Lin also won a silver medal at the prestigious Arthur Rubinstein piano competition in Israel last year.

But, while those tangible indications of a newfound zeal for his instrument are impressive, they are perhaps not as significant as the attitude change that has resulted from the pianist’s brief sabbatical from the keyboard.

“For the past two years, I have loved music more than I ever have before,” he said. “And it all started with the Cliburn.”

But his legions of fans shouldn’t get their hopes up that he’ll return for the 2017 Cliburn Competition. “I will see where my career is at that point,” he said. “A lot can happen between now and then. But, most likely, I won’t [compete at the next Cliburn].”

Playing the classical repertoire

On Friday, Lin will be featured in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a work he performed as part of his successful run at the Rubinstein Competition.

To an outside observer, it would appear that the crystalline precision of the classical-era style would leave less room for interpretation than the grand romantic-era works that pianists and audiences seem to favor.

But Lin finds that the repertoire from composers like those featured in this year’s festival requires him to do more with less. In fact, he once performed a Haydn piano sonata with such intense concentration that he played right through an earthquake that shook the hall.

“I don’t feel confined by the classical styles versus romantic styles. For me, [classicism] is very pure,” he said. “There are not as many notes. So each note is more meaningful and the approach is very different. But it is not just about being accurate or precise. It also has a lot of feeling.”

For his part, FWSO music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya will be trying his best to look busy on the podium.

“When these composers were active, conducting wasn’t there yet,” Harth-Bedoya said. “The composer, who was usually also playing an instrument, would lead the ensemble. So one of my biggest challenges is that I may have to be in the front of the group but not doing much.

“My work for these concerts will be in the preparation, to a much greater extent in this repertoire than in larger works where I have to be very active in maneuvering the orchestra [in performance].”

Also featured in the festival’s concerts will be Chilean pianist Gustavo Miranda-Bernales, who also was a preliminary-round competitor at the 2013 Cliburn. He will perform Haydn’s Piano Concerto No. 11 on Aug. 30.

And, on Saturday, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concertmaster David Coucheron will perform Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 (Turkish).

Harth-Bedoya said the purpose of focusing on these particular composers is to give the audience an understanding of the beginnings of both the symphony form and the symphonic orchestra.

“The music [of the classical era] is admired for its elegance and charm. But it is also very important for planting the seeds for what would be the great symphonies of the 19th century,” he said.

As the writing of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven expanded, he said, so did the concept of the orchestra.

“I think Haydn is one that laid the foundation,” said Harth-Bedoya, referring to the senior member of this festival’s trio. “Without Haydn, I think Mozart and Beethoven would have been quite different. So we are putting him next to his buddies.”

While even a casual concertgoer is likely to know something about the well-documented lives of Beethoven and Mozart (both got blockbuster biopics starring Hollywood heavyweights as the composers), the back story of Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) is less commonly heard.

Here are a few musical and biographical facts that might help fill in your knowledge of a composer who was making immortal music before Mozart and Beethoven were even born.

Nurturer, not inventor

Music patrons may have heard that the composer, who was known affectionately as “Papa” Haydn, is lauded as both the “father of the symphony” and the “father of the string quartet,” giving the impression that he was the first to work in those forms. He was not.

But he was monumentally important in formalizing and popularizing those types of works in particular.

Prodigious output

Haydn forwarded the progress of the symphony by writing a staggering 104 of them (at least; some may have been lost). That body of work sits beside 67 string quartets. And, what is less widely appreciated, he also wrote hundreds of works in other forms, including more than a dozen operas, concertos for a wide range of solo instruments and numerous oratorios, cantatas and other church music.

Also, in a more esoteric vein, he wrote more than 100 works for the baryton, a stringed instrument popular in his day but now obsolete, and hundreds of arrangements of folk songs from the British Isles.

And, over the course of his life, at least three major fires destroyed some of his manuscripts. So, even factoring in that Haydn enjoyed a relatively long life (he died at age 77), the sheer quantity of his compositions is awe-inspiring.

But, more importantly, an impressively high percentage of them are outstanding pieces of music.

Haydn knew them both

While Beethoven (1770-1827) and Mozart (1756-1791) probably crossed paths only once (Beethoven made a trek to Vienna to play for the composer he hoped would become his teacher), Haydn knew both men. He briefly taught Beethoven, but the two apparently did not get along.

Mozart was quite a different story. Haydn appears to have been one of the few contemporaries whom Mozart truly respected. The two even played in string quartets together, with Mozart on viola and Haydn taking the first violin part.

The elder composer’s high reciprocal regard for Mozart is evident in his reaction to having heard a set of string quartets the younger composer dedicated to him. He told Mozart’s father, Leopold: “Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.”

Lucky in music, unlucky in love

Less is known about Haydn’s personal life than those of Beethoven and Mozart. Part of the reason Haydn’s life was less documented is that he appeared to have a much less dramatic and colorful career than his better-known cohorts.

His genius was recognized and rewarded in the way one would hope rather than in the tortured fashion it was for so many of the great composers, and the pious and humble Austrian was obviously well liked and admired by almost everyone who came in contact with him.

With one exception.

Haydn’s wife, Maria Anna, was famously shrewish, leading one biographer to refer to their marriage as “disastrous.” But even that romantic stumble did not seem to cause Haydn much trouble. While the couple’s devout Catholicism prevented them from divorcing, it apparently did not prevent them both from taking other lovers after their relationship soured.

Have you heard the one about the Austrian composer?

For some listeners, the music of the classical era seems formal and mannered to the point of being a bit stuffy.

But Haydn was famous for his sense of humor, which often emerged in his compositions.

“There’s always a little bit of wit to his music. It’s very playful,” said pianist Steven Lin.

One of the most famous examples of his musical jokes is his Surprise symphony (No. 94), which features a loud outburst in its second movement that is designed to catch listeners off-guard.

“That will make the ladies scream,” Haydn said about his little trick.

Much earlier in his career, he may have been kicked out of a boys choir for snipping off the pigtail of a fellow chorister (but some sources say the cruelty of what puberty does to a boy’s voice had more to do with his dismissal than that prank).

Sources: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie; Classical Composers, edited by Peter Gammond; Dictionary of Musical Quotations, edited by Ian Crofton and Donald Fraser; www.classicfm.com; www.songfacts.com

This story was originally published August 25, 2015 at 10:43 AM with the headline "Pianist Steven Lin returns to Bass Hall with new perspective."